“For the most part, the novelist’s invitation to see is so much more compelling than the philosopher’s invitation to think,” writes Mark Rowlands in his strange hybrid of a book. That would certainly explain why there are many more bestselling novels than philosophical treatises. But if like Rowlands you are a philosopher, that poses a problem: how can you make philosophy grab readers and drag them along your often tortuous and sometimes torturous avenues of argument?
“Perhaps philosophy only becomes truly persuasive when it most closely approximates literature,” suggests Rowlands, who has already successfully taken his own advice. The Philosopher and the Wolf centred on his relationship with his canine companion, Brenin, and was an original and deeply involving combination of memoir and philosophical investigation. If his follow-up, Running With the Pack, did not reach the same heights, that says more about the excellence of its predecessor than its own deficiencies.
Whether Rowlands ran out of aut obiographical material or just wanted a new challenge, his latest book is an ambitious attempt to try another way of blurring the line between showing and telling. A Good Life comprises a fictional manuscript written by a man called Myshkin, discovered, annotated and edited by his son Nicolai, with a few interventions written by his mother Olga thrown in for good measure.
As a device, this has several merits, the greatest of which is how it undercuts the authority of the author. Rowlands is a respected academic but his creation, Myshkin, is an amateur, and the expertise of Nicolai is somewhat vague. The son warns us right at the start that in his father’s manuscript, “As far as the philosophy goes, some of it I think is clearly right, some of it is clearly wrong, and some of it could go either way.”
This is a clever way of reminding readers always to think for themselves, never to take the arguments offered on trust. It also gives Rowlands the licence to cut loose from the academic straitjacket, to throw out ideas that may or may not have legs without having to dot every i and cross every t. Plus, it allows him to dismiss a concept he doesn’t like as “a crock of shit”.
The conceit also helps Rowlands to develop his ideas about the importance of anachronism in understanding a human life. Myshkin’s text is littered with chronological anomalies, which Nicolai always picks up on. The central idea here is that if our identities are forged through memory, and memory is unreliable, then who we are is essentially defined by a series of anachronisms. It is not what we actually do but how we understand it that makes us who we are. The book’s weakness is that it only vaguely, rather than closely, approximates literature. The characters’ names may allude to ones in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot but the comparisons end there. Novelists show, but for the most part Rowlands’s characters merely tell.
Fortunately, however, Rowlands is an excellent communicator of philosophy and so the discussions he gives to Myshkin, Nicolai and Olga are all well worth reading. The range of topics covered touches on all that is important to a good life: religion, love, our treatment of animals, autonomy, love. He often manages to sum up paragraphs with the kind of pithy aphorism that makes you stop and take stock, such as “pessimism almost always comes down on the side of the status quo”, and “Compassion without calculation may be blind. But calculation without compassion is empty.”
One of the problems raised in the book is Mill’s now famous question about whether it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. We might equally well ask if an imperfect example of something daringly original is superior to a perfect example of something more mundane. How you answer that will determine whether you prefer the honourably flawed A Good Life or the more routine competence of less ambitious philosophers.
A Good Life is published by Granta (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
